BARRY
SWITZER

Bootlegger's Boy
WITH BUD SHRAKE

When Barry Switzer stepped down as head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners on June 16, 1989, he was the fourth most successful coach in NCAA history and, some say, "next to God," the most revered figure in the state of Oklahoma.

For sixteen years, Barry Switzer was both reviled and praised by the media as the supposed "outlaw" of college football, characterized as "the greatest rogue, pirate, hustler, and con man" ever to command a football team.

He is inarguably one of the most successful recruiters, motivators, and strategists ever to deliver a halftime speech.  His tireless efforts brought a long succession of All-Americans, Outland and Heisman trophy winners, Orange Bowls, and conference championships during his tenure - not to mention numerous victories over Oklahoma's heated rivals, in Nebraska, Texas, and elsewhere.

Within the rigid racial boundaries of southern society in the 1940s and 1950s, Barry Switzer was brought up in an unconventional multiracial world of black market whiskey and sports.  Before Barry graduated from college, his mother died by her own hand.  Not many years later, his father also died in an eerie circumstance that tragically reflected the trauma and turmoil of Barry's childhood.

Eventually, Barry Switzer was brought down, not by his own practices, but by the excesses of some unruly players, the media hysteria that resulted, and the witch-hunt that ensued at Oklahoma University.  Barry has now turned his back on college coaching for good - there is nothing left to restrain his legendary candor.  Here are but a few of the bombshells:

• amazing revelations of the conditions of employment under which Barry labored during his career at Oklahoma;


• a foiled attempt to plant drugs on an Oklahoma player;


• an open letter to Brian Bosworth;


• the mysterious circumstances surrounding the false criminal charges that forced Barry's resignation;


• the whole story of the Marcus Dupree affair, including the role played in it by a major national sports publication;

a point-by-point expose of the NCAA's accusations against the Oklahoma football program;

• and much, much more.

This book is Barry's chance to speak the true about his own techniques for recruiting players, the strategy and mindset that made his teams great, and some of the unrealistic and insensitive NCAA regulations that many coaches around the country feel they must circumvent if they are to be fair to the players in their "football families."  And he tells us what he feels about the directions the NCAA is now heading in a number of controversial areas and the impact it is having on disadvantage blacks.

As Barry is quick to point out, this isn't a "Bo, or Joe, or Lou book."  His story isn't plain vanilla.

Bud Shrake is a journalist and screenwriter who is the coauthor with Willie Nelson of a previous biography.  He lives in Austin, Texas.

"This is an important book because it shows a side of big-time football that, to be frank with you, I naively didn't really believe existed."
- From the Foreword by JOE PATERNO

"Bootlegger's Boy is a dazzling run for a touchdown if ever I've seen one.  Funny, tragic, informative, revealing...  Barry Switzer and Bud Shrake knock you out of your jock with the truth about big-time football - and America."
- DAN JENKINS

From amazon.com:

Fred Rogers (1928-2003) was an enormously influential figure in the history of television and in the lives of tens of millions of children. As the creator and star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindness. Rogers was fiercely devoted to children and to taking their fears, concerns, and questions about the world seriously.

The Good Neighbor, the first full-length biography of Fred Rogers, tells the story of this utterly unique and enduring American icon. Drawing on original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work, including a surprising decision to walk away from the show to make television for adults, only to return to the neighborhood with increasingly sophisticated episodes, written in collaboration with experts on childhood development. An engaging story, rich in detail, The Good Neighbor is the definitive portrait of a beloved figure, cherished by multiple generations.

From audible.com:

Number-one New York Times Best Seller • Discover the life-changing memoir that has inspired millions of readers through the Academy Award®-winning actor’s unflinching honesty, unconventional wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Guardian

“McConaughey’s book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did - and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand.” (Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)

I’ve been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life.

It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green, too.

Good luck.

From audible.com:

In this intimate, haunting literary memoir and New York Times Notable Book of the year, an American icon tells her story for the first time - about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter and a mother.

One of the most celebrated, beloved, and enduring actors of our time, Sally Field has an infectious charm that has captivated the nation for more than five decades, beginning with her first TV role at the age of 17. From Gidget's sweet-faced "girl next door" to the dazzling complexity of Sybil to the Academy Award-worthy ferocity and depth of Norma Rae and Mary Todd Lincoln, Field has stunned audiences time and time again with her artistic range and emotional acuity. Yet there is one character who always remained hidden: the shy and anxious little girl within.

With raw honesty and the fresh, pitch-perfect prose of a natural-born writer, and with all the humility and authenticity her fans have come to expect, Field brings listeners behind the scenes for not only the highs and lows of her star-studded early career in Hollywood, but deep into the truth of her lifelong relationships - including her complicated love for her own mother.

Powerful and unforgettable, In Pieces is an inspiring and important account of life as a woman in the second half of the 20th century.

From audible.com:

The story of John C. Houbolt, an unsung hero of Apollo 11 and the man who showed NASA how to put America on the moon.

Without John C. Houbolt, a mid-level engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon.

Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space.

Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit while the crafts were travelling at 3,600 miles an hour around the moon. His plan was ridiculed and considered unthinkable. But this junior engineer was irrepressible. He stood by his concept, fired off memos to executives, and argued that LOR was the only way to success.

For the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11, hear the untold story of the man who helped fulfill Kennedy’s challenge to reach the moon and begin exploring the final frontier.

SPURGEON
A New Biography
ARNOLD
DALLIMORE

It was fitting that Dr Arnold Dallimore (1911-98), author of a two-volume Life of George Whitefield (and more recently of The Life of Edward Irving) should then give us a book on Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92).  It was in 1962 that the four-volume Autobiography qf [sic] Spurgeon was republished in two volumes, with considerable rearrangement, but, even so, the Autobiography is too long to serve as a popular introduction.  Accordingly Dr Dallimore, using these two volumes and other dependable sources, produced a much more concise narrative of Spurgeon's life.  He also set out 'to understand and present something of the inner man - Spurgeon in his praying, his sufferings and depressions, his weaknesses and strengths; in his triumphs, humour, joys, and incredible accomplishments.'

It is no easy task to depict 'so tremendous a personality' as that of Spurgeon in a brief volume, but in 250 pages it is here accomplished, and with a large measure of success.  It will meet the need of those completely ignorant of Spurgeon and his vast achievements, but will stir also the interest of all who value a unique ministry, yielding 62 volumes of 'deathless' sermons and many other highly valuable publications.

Cover picture kindly supplied by the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London

"SPELLBINDING!"
- TIME

More amazing than any work of fiction, yet true in every word, it swept to the top of the bestseller lists and riveted the consciousness of the world.  As an Emmy Award-winning film starring Sally Field, is captured the home screens of an entire nation and has endured as the most electrifying TV movie ever made.  It's the true story of a survivor of terrifying childhood abuse, victim of sudden and mystifying blackouts, and the first case of multiple personality ever to be psychoanalyzed.  You're about to meet Sybil - and the sixteen selves to whom she played host, both women and men, each with a different personality, speech pattern, and even personal appearance.  You'll experience the strangeness and fascination of the woman's rare affliction - and travel with her on her long, ultimately triumphant journey back to wholeness.

"A MOVING HUMAN NARRATIVE."
- New York Review of Books

"ASTONISHING... IT FORCES YOU TO LOOK AT YOURSELF AND THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU IN A NEW WAY."
- Doris Lessing

A Main Selection of the Psychology Today Book Club
A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild®

"A TREASURE!"
CHICAGO TRIBUNE BOOK WORLD

"EXCELLENT BIOGRAPHY... SUCCEEDS REMARKABLY."
NEWSWEEK

Tracing Tolkien's life through diaries, private papers, letters and living memory, this is a vivid portrait of the man who created a whole magical world beloved to millions.  Answering the thousands of questions a whole generation of readers has asked, this authorized telling of Tolkien's life illuminates his epic work and provides a wonderful introduction for those who have never met hobbits, wizards, dragons, elves and orcs who populate Middle-earth.

"A PANORAMA OF VIGNETTES DONE WITH POISE AND EXHAUSTIVE COMMAND... CARPENTER HAS AN EYE FOR MAGIC...  IN HIS CHARGE A 'QUITE LIFE' BECOMES AN IN-DEPTH ACT OF RELISH."
THE WASHINGTON POST

"A VALUABLE LITERARY BIOGRAPHY... NOT ONLY A SPLENDID SUPPLEMENT TO THE EPIC, BUT JUST ABOUT THE BEST BOOK OF ITS KIND..."
NATIONAL OBSERVER